Other People's Love Affairs

August 1, 2018

"In the restaurant, people were eating alone," begins one story in this debut collection set in the English coastal town of Glass. (Owen was raised in both England and California, where he now lives.) Another story observes, "Sunday nights along the boardwalk are slow: locals retired, weekenders gone." Thus does Owen capture the sense of lives sometimes lonely, sometimes melancholy, yet moving steadily like the sea. In the touching opening piece, a woman caring for infants at a hospital seeks out an old man who knew her wild, dangerously irresponsible mother. He wants to help with the children, and when she must refuse, their friendship fades. The owner of a club remains in love with May, who sings there, though she has moved on; a woman tends house for a widower whose daughter rarely visits and finds connection as she reads to him; in the title story, Erma realizes after the death of longtime companion Violet that while she loved more deeply, people saw them as equally involved, itself a comfort. VERDICT Quietly affecting stories for readers tired of fireworks.

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June 18, 2018
Owen’s debut gathers lonely hearts from a town called Glass on England’s southern coast and dissects their melancholy across 10 stories. Among those characters “who’d never managed to disguise their disappointment with life” is Eleanor. She’s a kind nurse who, in “Lovers of a Kind,” becomes fond of a local vagrant she suspects was in love with her missing, deranged mother. Tony, an orphan, spends a troubling afternoon at the circus with his only friend, Mr. Avery, in “At the Circus.” There is May, a broken-hearted chanteuse who tolerates her besotted boss in “Virginia’s Birthday,” and the humiliated Kenneth, a dentist whose spirited ex-wife insists upon remaining his patient in “What Is Meant to Remain.” One or two stories veer into the macabre, as when a solitary caregiver takes comfort—pleasure almost—as her elderly ward comes to believe she is his dead wife in “Housekeeper.” And in the title story, Erma comes to the devastating conclusion after the death of her companion Violet that she was never loved in the way she, herself, loved. Owen populates his stories with those who drift, unmoored or lost—folk who believe themselves invisible, obsessed with memories and paths not taken. Though readers may wish for some light to balance the sadness, his is a lovely work of quiet, heart-wrenching prose.

June 15, 2018
Lonely people look for love.Where do all the lonely people come from? The answer seems to be from Glass, the English seaside town that serves as a backdrop for debut author Owen's short stories. In one, a nurse meets a poor, unkempt man who was once in love with her mother. He asks to volunteer in her hospital, but she refuses him. In another, the owner of a failing nightclub has been in love with a singer for decades after their one-night stand. In yet another, an old man returns to a movie theater where he once fell in love before his date had to return home to her infirm husband. These characters are alone, unhappy, and, deep down, so very good. Owen's stories are uniformly moving (how could you not feel for these people?), but they often border on sentimentality. A few, however, show a bit more steel. In "The Patroness," the hostess of a salon and a formerly beautiful film star snipe at each other. At the end of the party, the hostess gives the actress some much-needed money, and the narrator wonders at her show of "such generosity and malice." In the standout story of the collection, "Housekeeper," an unmarried woman named Louise cares for an old man, who suffers from increasingly severe strokes. As his mental faculties decline, she takes on the persona of his late wife: "She began, then, to read aloud in the voice of another woman, as she had long imagined it. She felt as though she were taking part in a grand and exquisite drama." Louise is sweet and kind, to be sure. She's also more than a little bit creepy. It's an intriguing duality.While sometimes overly sentimental, this collection shows promise in its darker moments.

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